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The visual images of Queen Elizabeth I displayed in contemporary portraits and perpetuated and developed in more recent media, such as film and television, make her one of the most familiar and popular of all British monarchs. This book is a collection of essays that examine the diversity of the queen's extensive iconographical repertoire, focusing on both visual and textual representations of Elizabeth, in portraiture, literature, contemporary sermons, speeches and alchemical treatises. It falls into three sections. The first part looks at the diverse range of religious and quasi-religious images that were employed by and about Elizabeth, such as the Prophetesse Deborah, the suggestive parallel with Joan of Arc, and finally Lady Alchymia, the female deity in alchemical treatises. When Queen Elizabeth I, the first female Protestant monarch, was enthroned in 1558, male poets, artists, theologians, and statesmen struggled to represent this new phenomenon. The second part turns to one of the major enterprises of the Elizabethan era, the attempt to colonise the New World, during which the eastern seaboard of America was renamed Virginia in celebration of the Virgin Queen. The last part focuses on the ways in which the classical world was plundered for modes of imaging and figuring the queen. Finally, the book summarises the enormously wide range of Elizabeth's iconographical repertoire of its appeal, and provides a fitting end to a book which ranges so widely across the allegorical personae of the queen.
that the three national anthems of the United Kingdom, whose identity was so strongly tied up with the Protestant succession, were composed by Catholics: Arne and Elgar. Coronations As Philip Ziegler wrote, ‘The coronation of a British monarch is the event which brings him more dramatically than any other to the forefront of his people
From the late nineteenth century, the British monarch was the constitutional head and cultural symbol of Greater Britain, a spiritual nexus providing unity and identity to a worldwide community of Britons. In Britons , Linda Colley identified the monarchy as central to the process through which the British defined themselves as a single people in the first place, while
consequences of royal insanity.8 Although his great dignity under affliction did George immense credit, his derangement and official incapacity played some part in the construction of a secular, fallible and essentially ordinary monarchy. The suffering George, with his delicately wavering personal and institutional authority, was the first British monarch to invite both sympathetic approachability and unruffled voyeurism among his subjects. That the King’s illness should have struck him at a time when political ‘madness’ was threatening to sweep monarchs from their thrones
, setting in place law codes, administration and taxation. The first British Resident in Kandy, John D’Oyly, respectfully took part in Buddhist processions and made temple offerings, just as the kings had done. Governor Brownrigg, created a baronet in March 1816, later incorporated a representation of the Kandy crown and sceptre into his personal coat of arms. Governors represented the British monarch with
Moving images of the British monarchy, in fact and fiction, are almost as old as the moving image itself, dating back to an 1895 dramatic vignette, The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Led by Queen Victoria, British monarchs themselves appeared in the new 'animated photography' from 1896. Half a century later, the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II was a milestone in the adoption of television, watched by 20 million Britons and 100 million North Americans. At the century's end, Princess Diana's funeral was viewed by 2.5 billion worldwide. Seventeen essays by international commentators examine the portrayal of royalty in the 'actuality' picture, the early extended feature, amateur cinema, the movie melodrama, the Commonwealth documentary, New Queer Cinema, TV current affairs, the big screen ceremonial and the post-historical boxed set. These contributors include Ian Christie, Elisabeth Bronfen, Andrew Higson, Steven Fielding, Karen Lury, Glyn Davis, Ann Gray, Jane Landman, Victoria Duckett, Jude Cowan Montague, James Downs, Barbara Straumann, Deirdre Gilfedder, Jo Stephenson, Ruth Adams, Erin Bell, Basil Glynn and Nicola Rehling.
In 1910 the Union of South Africa became a British Dominion. However, rather than proclaim loyalty to the British monarch –the titular head of the British empire – some South Africans, notably those who identified as Afrikaners or Netherlanders, professed loyalty to the monarch of a rival empire, the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina. This chapter examines oorkonden (decorative letters) sent to Wilhelmina from her supporters in South Africa throughout her reign (1898–1948). The letters provide new evidence of how links with a Dutch colonial past that pre-dated British colonisation were revived by a white community reeling from defeat in the South African War (1899–1902), who continued to contest certain modes of their integration into a British imperium. The letters also suggest the particular appeal of a female king to Afrikaner women in a nascent women’s movement. Finally, the letters reveal the persistence of a notional ‘Dutch world’ that exceeded the bounds of the Netherlands’ formal empire in the early twentieth century.
In 1911, King George V was the first and last reigning British monarch to visit Britain’s Indian Empire. His coronation durbar in Delhi represented both the political and cultural pinnacle of the ritual apparatus developed during the second half of the nineteenth century, but also the ways in which it was unravelling in the years before the First World War. It also
romance, costume drama and melodrama, with their ready-made female following. The reign of the current British monarch is as foundational to the history of television as that of her great-great-grandmother Victoria is to the cinema. The 1953 coronation is famously cited as a milestone in the adoption of the new medium, doubling the number of UK TV licence holders as Britons bought sets for the first time in order that they and
nurtured loyal and docile allies who revered the British monarch. Erased from this narrative is that Canada’s First Nations deployed the symbol of Victoria to draw attention to injustice and to call for justice. While the British drew on ‘Great Mother’ and ‘red children’ metaphors to emphasise the inferior position of the colonised people of the Empire, to ‘fix, rank